Synopsis
Chronicles the work's one-hundred-year history, from its creation shortly before the artist's death, to its sale for $82.5 million in 1990
Reviews
Saltzman, a onetime reporter for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal (and a former Kirkus contributor), chronicles the peripatetic fate of one of van Gogh's last paintings, from his brother Theo's unsellable stock to a record-breaking auction at Christie's in 1990. In papers found after his suicide, van Gogh had written to Gauguin, ``I have a portrait of Dr. Gachet with the heartbroken expression of our time,'' 100 years before its spectacular sale for $82.5 million at the peak of the go-go '80s bubble art market. Saltzman draws the story of van Gogh's reputation and the painting's ownership from a detailed collage of biography, art criticism, history, and current events. Dr. Ferdinand Gachet, the portrait's subject, was an elderly doctor in the isolated village of Auvers who served as van Gogh's last recourse for his undiagnosed mental illness. The painting's itinerary after van Gogh's suicide is almost epic. First it went to his art-dealer brother, Theo, in Paris, then to Theo's widow, who took it to Holland. She had to try several dealers before placing it outside the circle of avant-garde connoisseurs. The portrait found its first institutional owner in Frankfurt's Stadel art museum, purchased by the prescient director Georg Swarzenski, who had to endure its confiscation in 1937 by the Nazi government and its exhibition as ``degenerate art.'' It then fell into the hands of Hermann Goring, who liquidated it for foreign currency in 1938. Eventually passing into the hands of a collector who emigrated to America, it was often displayed in American museums, until a combination of new tax laws and soaring art prices brought it to the auction block. To become the sequestered property of a bankrupt Japanese businessman. An intriguing map of the painting's wanderings, but what this journalistic account fails to convey is insight into the works significance and of the emotional investment of those who tried to save or possess this refugee artwork. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
... a brilliant idea for a book, and she has executed it wondrously.... Saltzman also offers an incisive survey of the previous century's intellectual and economic cycles, as well as a savvy analysis of the art world and its politicking. But this marvelous book is even more than that.
Saltzman's meticulously researched narrative shows how historical forces and turning points in individual lives have determined the fate of a celebrated painting. The story begins in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, where a disturbed Vincent van Gogh churned out his last work before his suicide in 1890. Physician Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a melancholic amateur painter, did little to alleviate van Gogh's suffering, but he posed for the portrait that captured, in van Gogh's own words, "the heartbroken expression of our time." Over the next century, the painting had 13 owners; it was hung in private homes and world-famous museums, and traveled to Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and New York. Confiscated as "degenerate art" by the Nazis and smuggled out of Germany during WWII, it was on loan off and on for 50 years to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, before fetching $82.5 million at auction. Since the death of its last owner, a Japanese paper magnate, its whereabouts are unknown, and the art world waits for the masterpiece to resurface. Meanwhile, though this book's detail about art dealers and collectors may be more than the casual reader wishes to know, the capsule biography of van Gogh, the criminality of Nazi art thieves and the fevered May 15, 1990, art auction at Christie's provide gripping real-life drama. In all, Saltzman (a former reporter for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal) offers an illuminating case study of provenance. Eight pages of b&w illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Weeks before his suicide in 1890, van Gogh painted a portrait of his physician in a melancholy pose and uncannily labeled it "the heartbroken expression of our time." This is a richly detailed, dramatic account of the amazing journey of the portrait from its creation in a French village to the record-breaking $82.5 million paid for it by a Japanese industrialist a century later. After several ownerships, it was placed in a Frankfurt museum only to be confiscated by the Nazis and deposited in a Berlin warehouse. When the avaricious Hermann Goring sold the canvas, it was acquired by a Jewish investment banker living in Amsterdam, who fled to New York with Dr. Gachet. Saltzman, a former reporter, weaves a spellbinding narrative involving the global art market, political upheavals, connoisseurs, dealers, and the sad visage of Dr. Gachet, which is now again on the auction block. Recommended for all audiences.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
After years of public display at the Met, the famously melancholic Portrait of Dr. Gachet was auctioned off in 1990 for a record-smashing price, then shipped to Japan where it lay in boxed storage. And that was not the painting's first removal from public viewing: the Nazis confiscated it from a Frankfurt museum as a piece of "degenerate" art and spirited it onto the art market, hoping, if not to get some appreciation out of it, to make some meager marks instead. Such are some of the convolutions in this splendid tale, in which Saltzman uses the canvas' history to identify synergies between art, politics, and commerce. She elides easily between these elements of Gachet's story, launching from the subject of the painting, a crank of a doctor who attended Van Gogh in his last weeks, into a journey of fascinating biography based on the painting's dozen or so owners and their roles in creating a market for postimpressionists. An amply illustrated work bound to attract artistic and general attention. Gilbert Taylor
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